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The University of Wisconsin -- Madison is launching a new urban research park. The facility will be located in an "edgy" part of town with connections to a fiber optic network.

This story highlights the growing role universities are playing in urban regenertion.The story also underscores the growing importnace of recent college graduates in building high growth companies. Two of the recent start-up businesses cited in the article have a total of thirty employees.

Read more.

Here's an interesting idea out of Kentucky: employer roundtables. With the State and the University of Kentucky as partners, the Roundtable meets to develop strategies that simultaneously benefit employers and employees.

"Their goal is to help Kentucky's employers become 'employer-of-choice' organizations. They are equally interested in the individual workplace as they are in assuring Kentucky's ability to court and secure viable businesses and talent from around the world," said Personnel Cabinet Secretary Nikki Jackson. 

You can read more about the Roundtable here and visit their web site here.

Purdue University has started a new fund to assist startup companies. The new fund will help technologies started at the University to spin out into commercial companies.

The University is targeting $1.5 million as the initial capitalization.

Read more.

Earlier this month, Governor Granholm of Michigan signed legislation to create Centers of Energy Excellence.

The purpose of these centers is to bring together the assets of the business, universities and government to accelerate the development of alternative energy businesses. You can learn more about this initiative from this article.

Here's a summary of the legislation.

Here's a good idea. Bring together all the people in your region who are teaching entrepreneurship. Share the best ideas and provide some recognition to leading edge thinkers and doers.

That's what happened at Colorado Mountain College recently:  a  “Best Practices for Teaching Entrepreneurship” Conference. Learn more.

Educational attainment is the single most important driver of regional economic development. So, it's no surprise that leading communities are starting to explore how to boost educational opportunities, as an economic development strategy.

As this strategy evolves, the separation between economic development and workforce development will dissolve.

Last week, two important events took place. Both involve new types of scholarship programs.

PromiseNet 2008

Since its launch a couple of years ago, the Kalamazoo Promise has focused civic leaders on new approaches to create incentives for education. The initiative provides college scholarships to children in the Kalamazoo City Schools. Watch a video briefing of the Kalamazoo Promise.

Educational incentives -- directed toward people -- have a direct impact on economic outcomes (higher incomes over a lifetime).Economic incentives directed toward companies generally do not work and are largely a waste of money.

PromiseNet 2008 brought together representatives from 75 communities across the country to explore college scholarships for city school children. The event marks the beginning of a national movement toward community scholarships.

Read more: Kalamazoo PromiseNet conference to share programs' expertise.

Early child education scholarships

In another event last week, I attended a conference at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis for the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago. We focused on the importance of education (human capital, as the economists would have it) to economic outcomes in the Great Lakes. Our major research universities are exploring new avenues of collaboration.

At lunch yesterday, Art Rolnick, an economist with the FRB in Minneapolis, briefed us on a new scholarship pilot that focuses on early child care. The scholarship program is remarkably simple: it awards parents of young children with a scholarship for early education. This focus on early education as an economic development strategy has a strong foundation of evidence to support it. Read more.

The prestigious Committee for Economic Development in Washington DC strongly supports this strategy. The focus on early childhood development is closely connected to new learning in brain development. Here's an excellent overview by Joan Stiles, a cognitive scientist at UCSD.

EDPros are often frustrated about what to do with K-12 school systems that do not work very well.

The solution, of course, is to innovate.

One important innovation in high schools is career academies. Ft. Wayne is one city that has committed itself to this strategy, and it will pay off in the long run, as employers continue to look for talent. 

In Washington yesterday, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation released an important study on the impact of career academies. The report represents the first rigorous evaluation of career academies.

After evaluating graduates from nine career academies, the authors found that eight years after graduation, the career academy graduates had significantly higher employment and earnings.

The report also dispels one of the more dangerous myths we share today: that career and technical education in high school limits post secondary options.

To quote from the summary (in language that is a bit stilted, but you'll get the idea):

The findings demonstrate the feasibility of improving labor market preparation and successful school-to-work transitions without compromising academic goals and preparation for college. Investments in career-related experiences during high school can produce substantial and sustained improvements in the labor market prospects and transitions to adulthood of youth. In fact, Career Academies are one of the few youth-focused interventions that have been found to improve the labor market prospects of young men.

There are about 2,500 career academies across the U.S.

You can can read more about the report here.

Here's a suggestion: Send the article and report to school superintendents and other civic leaders in your region. Suggest that they connect with the Career Academy Support Network at UC Berkeley to learn more.

Prosperity demands rapid adaptation or, if you prefer, resilience.

Building a stronger regional economy comes from seeing with new eyes. How can our existing assets connect to new opportunities?

Here's an article out of Akron about the adaptation of manufacturing firms to new opportunities in health care markets. The trend revealed itself recently in a forum in Northeast Ohio. Read more.

As Doug Hall, former P&G exec and founder of Eureka Ranch notes, innovation opportunities can emerge anywhere. The process, however, requires discipline, and Doug has been introducing this discipline to smaller manufacturers nationwide though the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

Here's an example of an opportunity: Replacing vinyl shower curtains with less toxic materials. Folks in Massachusetts are looking at that one: "New shower curtain smell’ dangerous to health, environment".

The opportunities will multiply as our universities and businesses learn to collaborate. Read this opinion piece out of Seattle: Educating a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs

You need more than a building and some commercially attractive technologies for an incubator to flourish. That's the lesson for the Arlington Technology Incubator. 

The new director seems to be heading in the right direction. He is taking concrete steps to create the business support networks needed for entrepreneurial start-ups to take root. Read more. 

He would do well to learn the lessons of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development in Research Triangle. CED does not operate an incubator, but the organization has mastered the challenge of building open, supportive networks. Learn more from the CED web site. 

One of my favorite incubators is the Youngstown Business Incubator. Run by a firebrand, Jim Cossler, the YBI is at the center of transforming the economy in the 

Another one of my favorites: An incubator network promoted by the National Renewable Energy Lab  (NREL). The Clean Energy Alliance is an impressive bunch, all working as a national network to assist each other with clean energy start-ups.  

One other thought: I'm not sure that a chamber of commerce is best suited to oversee this kind of work. It will always be a distraction from the core mission of a chamber: serving its members. 

Access and funding of higher education are becoming critical economic development issues.  The reason is simple. Educational attainment represents one of the clearest drivers of economic prosperity.  Not surprisingly, colleges and universities are emerging as critical assets around which regional economies can be strengthened.

Here's another way that colleges and universities can play an important role in building regional collaboration. Virtually every college or university campus has some faculty schooled in the skills of facilitation. That's a valuable asset when you are trying to build new collaborative habits among economic development (and workforce development) organizations. 

Here's an example from Moline, IL. Two representatives from the University of Northern Iowa helped facilitate a session among the different parties involved in economic development. Read more.  

When it comes to forging new habits of collaboration, the soft stuff really is the hard stuff.